The woman led Gordon into an office. He swallowed the lump in his throat. But a cabinet post, he thought. He was a born appointee.
‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Senator Davis?’ came the breaking voice of a kid.
‘Who is this?’ Gordon demanded — deeply disappointed.
‘You gotta get out of that gym right now, sir. I’m sorry! I think I really screwed up. I’ve… I’ve already called the police.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Gordon asked as another phone chirped and the woman picked it up.
‘Just trust me, sir. Please! Go! Right now!’ There was a click as the boy hung up.
The woman held up the other phone. ‘They said it’s urgent.’
Gordon raised the other receiver to his ear. ‘Gordon Davis.’
‘Sir, my name is Carl Jaffe. I’m Deputy Director of the Secret Service. We’d like you to get your family and head to the school’s security office. We have some agents en route and they’ll meet you…’
Long rips of automatic weapons fire erupted inside the gymnasium. The woman next to him jumped with a start then stared at the glass door, her mouth agape. The first screams rose but were drowned out by still more shooting. Gordon dropped the phone and rushed for the door. A torrent of booming gunfire assaulted his ears as he headed out of the office into a full-blown war.
Well-dressed parents, wild-eyed with panic, streamed out of the gymnasium with young children in their arms or being pushed along by firm grips on their shoulders. Some had lost all control and screamed wildly as Gordon waded into the flood of people fleeing the terror inside. The going was slow against the human tide. The rapid-fire bursts of the guns were brief and selective now. Shoulders and elbows pummeled Gordon in mindless flight from the terrible noise, some people bent over to run in a stoop. When Gordon reached the tunnel that led into the gym, he saw the first blood. It streamed down the face of a stunned middle-aged woman from beneath neatly groomed blonde hair, coating her white silk blouse in remarkably brilliant crimson.
The next burst of gunfire was long and jarring, emanating from just inside the gym. Its horrendous noise made Gordon pause, and it easily drowned out the horrible wails of the panic-stricken. A great wave of humanity gushed into the tunnel — their vigor renewed by the now incessant sounds of several guns. Gordon was battered by blows so great that he was being swept with them — away from his wife and daughters. With all the strength he could muster he tore at the crowd, parting the men, women and children with rough shoves as he barely maintained his footing.
Another long tear of fire — closer and much louder than before — caused people to throw themselves to the ground all around, clearing the tunnel momentarily.
Gordon slammed into a man who dashed out of the gym looking over his shoulder. The man turned, and he and Gordon stared at each other for a moment — each stunned. The man wore a calf-length black overcoat. His blond hair was shorn short, mere bristles. His blue eyes shone in stark contrast to his tanned face. They were in that instant all alone.
The man stepped back and raised a smoking machine pistol. The muzzle of the ugly black gun traced a line up Gordon’s body that he could almost feel as a prickly itch along its aim point. A shiver that began as a tingle in his groin rippled across Gordon’s body as the man’s blue eyes smiled and the gun steadied on Gordon’s chest.
‘No!’ Gordon yelled just as a bullet smashed into the metal stands right beside the gunman. The blond man flinched and twisted, the muzzle of his gun spitting flame. Gordon felt the weapon’s hot breath, but the sting of bullets did not follow. He darted under the sloping bleachers to his right, the blazing gun swinging to follow him but the bullets miraculously striking a thick concrete pillar in between. Stooped over and hurling himself into the darkness beneath the stands as fast as his feet would carry him, Gordon felt jabs of pain in his ears from the sounds of the machine pistol’s fire. When the shooting stopped a second or two later, Gordon looked back and saw through the maze of supports and columns. A school security guard lay in the tunnel in a pool of blood. In his hand he still clutched his pistol.
A stunning blow struck the side of Gordon’s head. He reached out into the semi-darkness and felt his way around the concrete support with which he’d collided. His head was throbbing in pain, but his attention returned to the blue-eyed gunman who peered after him from the well-lit tunnel. He was slapping another long magazine into his weapon.
Flame erupted from the gun, and Gordon slid around the thick pillar to the opposite side. Bullets cut through the air all around and thumped into the concrete at his back. The trusses and girders and concrete pillars under the stands were lit in the strobe of the flaming muzzle.
The gun fell silent, but Gordon’s ears still rang. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ the man’s lilting voice came. It had a strangely resonant quality to it in the steel hollows under the stands. He had trilled his Rs deep in the back of his throat. He was foreign. Another long rip of fire clanged off the girders ahead of Gordon, sending great showers of sparks through the air.
Gordon took off running, heading deeper and deeper under the stands. He dodged the increasingly thick forest of obstacles visible in the blazing light from the killer’s gun. Sparks rained down on him from clanging ricochets, and fierce spitting sounds tore open the air just inches from his body. Sprays of splattered concrete stung his face and hands as he ran dodging and weaving through the erector-set maze.
The gun fell silent again, and Gordon slowed and stooped over low to the ground in a crouch. His breath came in shallow pants and his heart thumped against his chest so hard he added it to his list of worries. Darkness descended on the ever-lower stands around the curved end of the basketball arena. Gordon felt his way into the deepest, darkest regions — his face covered with a thin gauze of spider webs. The clacking sounds of another magazine being popped into the machine pistol presaged another storm of lead.
‘You can run, but you cannot hide,’ the thickly accented voice tormented Gordon, who probed now through the near-total darkness. He held his hands in front like antennae, his fingers jamming into the hard obstacles just ahead of his body.
A burst lit the way ahead for just an instant, and Gordon dropped to his knees to crawl into the recesses of the stone and steel cavern.
Gordon dragged himself through the heavy coating of dust still covering the floor from the gym’s construction. He squeezed his body as far as it would go into the wedge formed by the lowest row in the stands and pressed his back between two heavy girders that rose at an angle to the sides. Inside the gym above him, the shooting had stopped. But the shrieks and shouts and the vibrations of stamping feet against the steel at Gordon’s back told a story of unspeakable horror. His wife. His two precious daughters. Tears welled up in his eyes, which he jammed closed to shut out the picture that flashed through his head. Oh, God, no!
‘Sounds like some sort of distu-u-urbance up there, ya?’ the man asked coolly — trilling his R deep in his throat in a thickly Germanic accent. ‘Maybe you are worried about Mrs Davis, eh?’ He knew Gordon’s name! ‘Maybe your delicious young daughters, ya?’
He was close. In the hard, enclosed space, every sound was sharp. It focused Gordon’s mind, shutting out the background commotion from the bleachers above.
‘Maybe you and I, ve could go find out, ya? Find out if your family is safe?’ The man was cool, his manner almost serene. Gordon saw him now, creeping forward in the darkness — the dim profile of his pistol leading the way. He was moving slowly past Gordon, who lay totally still — curled in a fetal position and breathing slowly, quietly, through his parched mouth.